Community college student-parents: priorities for persistence

This study of community college student-parents used interpretive phenomenological analysis of interview data contributed by 15 participants from three Mountain West Community Colleges. The participants qualified by the following criteria: had delayed college entrance by 2 years or more, had a child not yet in kindergarten, were full-time students in an associate degree program, worked part-time, and had 15 credits or more toward their degree. This study revealed what it meant for student-parents to have success while they addressed the challenges of balancing work, home, child care, and academic responsibilities. The student-parents described experiences that required prioritizing responsibilities, managing time effectively, securing needed support services, addressing stress, developing strategies for study and parenting, and maintaining a positive mindset. The findings include quotations that describe the challenges of each student-parent; whether individually unique, conflicting, or shared by the subset of this nontraditional student group. The student-parents shared a common sense of resolve to use prioritizing strategies as they made decisions affecting their degree completion. Student-parents had the common goal to obtain a better life for themselves and their children.     

Community college faculty job satisfaction

The Herzberg two-factor theory separates job satisfaction and dissatisfaction by postulating that satisfaction is related to intrinsic factors or motivators, while dissatisfaction results from extrinsic factors or hygienes. Using the critical incident method, 222 community college instructors from twelve colleges were asked to relate aspects of their work that led them to feel satisfied and aspects that led them toward feelings of dissatisfaction. More than two-thirds of the group indicated that they gained satisfaction from student learning or from interaction with students, and nearly two-thirds related administrative, collegial, and/or organizational difficulties as leading to dissatisfaction. The two-factor theory was supported. Implications for collective bargaining, administrative action, and faculty professionalism are noted.     

Assessing community college transfer performance

Transfer education is one of the most important, most criticized, and most difficult to measure of the functions performed by community colleges. If the performance of community colleges is to be properly assessed, problems of measuring and analyzing the transfer function must be solved. This paper seeks to answer several basic questions about community colleges' transfer performance, using California as a case example, and to show that useful conclusions may be reached even in the absence of perfect information. Many criticisms of the transfer function focus on the decline in numbers of students transferring from community colleges to four-year institutions that began in the late 1970s. This paper suggests that criticism about the transfer function, insofar as it stems from the number or rate of students transferring (as most of the criticism does), is unfounded. Until there is more precise information on students, research on particular problems like minority underrepresentation, students' course selection and outside employment, and the reverse transfer should prove more fruitful than looking simply at transfer numbers.     

The American community college: From access to success

Community colleges have taken center stage as engines of economic renewal. In his primer on this distinctively American institution, George R. Boggs highlights student learning as the engine within the engine.     

社区教育与社区学院建设的若干思考

我国社区教育正由大城市向县级城市及其农村延伸。在社区教育发展过程中,对社区教育的内涵和功能特点,社区学院的办学职能等尚有不同的认识。文章总结归纳了社区教育的四个功能特点,对基层干部群众提出的发展社区教育的一些模糊、片面认识,以及对社区学院的办学职能提出了一些看法,同时,对以基层电大为基础创办社区学院提出了若干对策建议。